Springtime for Hitler

In France, the wounds of war are only thinly healed, as proven by the pained response to a recent exhibit of 270 color photographs by André Zucca, called “Les Parisiens sous l’Occupation” (“Parisians Under the Occupation”). The photographs are of street life in Paris during wartime, and they’re said to be the only known color photographs from then. The show ran from March 30 through July 1, at the Bibliothèque Historique de la Ville de Paris. I was there last week to catch the last day of the exhibit; two days before, Le Monde published an account of the controversies, describing the wide range of responses in the museum’s guest books. Zucca was a photographer for the German propaganda magazine “Signal,” and the images in this show were indeed made at the same time as those with which he sordidly made his living. Many of his photographs do indeed show a city at cheerful ease (as, for example, this widely discussed image of three stylish women enjoying a sunny day in the park). Thus, one visitor wrote, “Enjoying Occupation,” and another said,

The main thing was not to be Jewish or a resister (terrorists, they were called!). The theatres and the concerts were more or less free; we young people took advantage of them. We stayed out of politics, like 80% of the French people.

The exhibit got off on the wrong foot with the public when, at the time of its opening, no mention was made of Zucca’s professional activities during wartime. The mayor of Paris, Bertrand Delanoë, demanded that the library add information to that effect (and when I was there, the show featured both a wall poster and a handout at the ticket counter identifying Zucca as a propaganda photographer). But this is one case where the publicity works counter to the effect of the work. For instance, as seen in this small sampling of works from the show, Zucca makes sure to capture a German soldier intruding on the frame of a sunlit view of the Place de la Concorde and a coolly chilling image of a woman in the Marais, the traditional Jewish neighborhood, wearing the compulsory yellow Star of David. The exhibit also features another such image, as well as images of German soldiers on defiant parade through the streets of Paris, the endemic propaganda posters, a movie theatre transformed into a recreation center for German soldiers, along with other photographs that, quietly, subtly, but unambiguously, document the Nazi jackboot that was pressuring Paris.

Certainly, Zucca couldn’t get the whole story: he photographed Jews wearing the star but couldn’t show the roundups or the deportation to Auschwitz; he could show German soldiers but couldn’t show the arrest, torture, and execution of resisters. He couldn’t, but nobody could; the problem wasn’t that he worked for a propaganda rag: photographers who actively worked for the Resistance couldn’t do it either. But what he did do was to capture the paradoxes of the Occupation, where horror and pleasure coexisted in shockingly close proximity, where the active resistance to Nazi occupation was in fact far less prevalent than the feigned daily oblivion of those who kept their heads down and tried to cope. The rich and painterly color of Zucca’s images (due to his access to German Agfacolor film stock) does make the fashionable delights of wartime Paris look sumptuous indeed—had French films at the time been made in color, there might have been no Resistance at all—but a perceptive eye will also note in his images a conscious effort to suggest, perhaps at great personal risk, the cadaverous rot beneath the captive city’s cosmetic-smeared face. (The catalogue for this remarkable show is available at www.amazon.fr)—Richard Brody

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